Archive for the ‘PhysX Hardware’ Category

Many of you know that so called Hybrid PhysX setups (using ATI GPU for graphics and Nvidia GPU for PhysX – in one system) are officially banned by Nvidia. Unofficially – available through GenL PhysX mod. However, all this hacking and patching isn’t appropriate for certain users, not to mention that Nvidia can find a way to block Hybrids completely one day.

New Lucid Hydra, technology that can split graphics rendering even between ATI and Nvidia GPUs in Multi-GPU setups, was rumored as compromising solution for Hybrid PhysX problem. (can’t say we believed in that).

Question “How Ageia PhysX PPU can handle newest GPU PhysX titles ?” is still interesting for some people, ATI owners for example. NinjaLane has published PhysX Performance Tests – The way games should be played article, that includes benchmarks of old Ageia PhysX PPU card along with Nvidia GPUs.

While PPU is still good at Unreal Tournament 3 and Mirror’s Edge, it has insufficient power to run latest titles like Batman Arkham Asylum with smooth framerate.

Following Geeks3D report on that recent driver update disables PhysX hardware acceleration not only for Nvidia GPUs, but for Ageia PPUs as well (if non-Nvidia graphics card is present in the system) we’ve desided to perform small investigation.

Test methodology is simple enough: we’ll use certain sample from PhysX SDK 2.8.1 Build 13 to identify if Ageia PPU is working and initializing properly with different PhysX drivers on several systems with Nvidia and ATI GPUs.

As you can see, in both cases Ageia PPU was recognised properly by the system, and hardware acceleration is working too (test applications indicates that both scene and cloth simulations are running in hardware)

What will happen if we’ll try same scenario, but now with ATI GPU installed in the system ?